Where is the recovery data and how do I use it?

[WGroleau]

Both Writer and Calc on my Macbook sometimes get the busy cursor for a long time, almost as if swapping terribly on a slow disk. But I have eight gig of RAM and a half-full one terabyte SSD. Might be a Mac problem. Whatever.

Today, I opened a document that already had my styles defined, deleted most of the old text, saved it to a new name, and spent two or three hours composing new stuff. Then the entire Mac froze and I had to force power-off. When I rebooted, the new document did not appear in the recovery window.

I found the new document and opened it. No changes since the Save As. But preferences says to save auto recovery data every ten minutes. Is that data in some secret place I can dig out and use in some way?

[charlie.it]

Found the secret place here, in the hidden user folder:

• Hold down the Alt key and select Go in the Finder

• Library > Application Support > LibreOffice > 4 > user

If my answer helped you, vote it with and with ∧ (here on the left)

[WGroleau]

This is almost correct, though it doesn’t explain why no recovery data was offered that time. It helped me to find some of these files, two layers down from there, in temp//.tmp The asterisks are filenames obscured by UUIDs or other gibberish, but if you can figure out which file, you can copy it to another name.

[PYS]

Hi

I do not know mac, but with linux and windows these files are saved in the temporary folder specified in Options▸LibreOffice▸Paths▸Temporary files (not in the User folder).

You can have more information about the other option Always create backup copy in the FAQ.

Regards

[WGroleau]

Always create backup saves the previous version when you do an explicit save. This is of no use in recovering edits made before a crash. And according to the same FAQ, if LibOff fails to find the auto-recovery file, and I find it, I won’t be able to use it. Actually, it isn’t true. The filename is greatly obscured, but if you can figure out which file it is, it is just an ordinary LibreOffice file. Copy it to a name that ends in .ods/.odt/etc. and open it like any other.

[JaneJEllis44]

Maybe you can try uFlysoft Data Recovery for Mac, it can recover LOST DATA on Mac only in three steps:
Step 1. Launch the software to scan the device where your files deleted
Step 2: Preview the scan result files and make mark if it is the one you find
Step 3: Recover files
http://www.uflysoft.com/

[WGroleau]

I did not go to that site because it “has a very poor reputation for trustworthiness.” But if it is like most such utilities, it will be for restoring deleted files, NOT for recovering edits that I didn’t get a chance to save.